My home pregnancy test showed a faint line. Am I pregnant?

Probably, but you should test again in a few days to make sure. For a home pregnancy test to give you a positive result, your body has to be making a detectable level of the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG).

When you get pregnant, your hCG level starts to increase. Most home tests are designed to be positive when you're two to three days late for a period (or 15 to 16 days after ovulation). If there's a faint line, there's only a small amount of hCG in your urine, usually because it's early in the pregnancy.

Some pregnancy tests are more sensitive to hCG than others. A more sensitive pregnancy test might turn clearly positive even if a low amount of the hormone is present, while a less sensitive test taken at that same time might show a faintly positive result.

If you still have the box, it should say somewhere what the test's sensitivity is — the lower the number, the better the test. For example, a test with a sensitivity of 20 IU/L (international units per liter) will determine whether you're pregnant sooner than a test with a sensitivity of 50 IU/L. A good rule of thumb is that the more expensive a pregnancy test is, the more sensitive it's likely to be. But you should still read the side of the box to see what it says.

Many women get a faintly positive result if they're not as far along as they expected. If this is your situation, taking another test in two or three days should give you results that are more exact.

If your test is faintly positive for a few days and then turns completely negative, you may have had a very early miscarriage. Experts estimate that about 20 to 30 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, so unfortunately this is very common.

Keep in mind that almost all women who have a very early miscarriage are eventually successful, so even a briefly positive pregnancy test should be encouraging when you're trying to conceive.

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